HotKarot Sonification

Another step in our data-hacking have been sound-based recipes. Sound frequencies are numerical variables that can be easily translated into the colour frequencies, and those – if you are cooking in OpenSauce interface – into single sauce ingredients. Our first question was, what kind of sound should we actually use. We didn’t find any good reason why to turn some third party songs into recipes…maybe we should have asked someone to sing for us and turned the tones into a sauce…well but we just haven’t. Instead we realized that along with our OpenSauce data-hacks, we are somehow loosing our initial leading character – the hot carrot! So we decided to let the carrot enter the stage again and make her (yes, we think it’s she) produce the sounds by herself. Here is how it works: carrot bioelectricity is measured by arduino kit, and then transferred into the computer via alligator clips attached to the carrot peeler. The peeler works as a connector here, closing the whole human-techno-veggie electric circuit: each peel gives you a stream of biodata that are subsequently translated into sound frequencies via pure data software: so as long as you keep peeling, you are producing a sound. But it doesn’t end with this MaKey MaKey-like stuff (all due respect), as the sounds are then turned into the sauce, okay? It’s more about SoundSaucing than „mere“ veggie-music production – it’s the convergence of sound and taste what plays the lead here. Call it technologically enhanced audial-gustatory synesthesia, if you wish.

The sonified carrot looks like that and this is how we practice in our studio.